Robot helpers and flying houses: Edinburgh fringe tips for families
From wacky versions of The ABC Song to Quentin Blake’s eccentric Mrs Armitage, these five shows offer fun for young audiences
Bleep Bleep!
Imagine Diane Morgan’s Ann Droid for the over fives crowd. A man takes delivery of a lifesize robot helper, only to find this eager-to-please android takes his tasks too seriously. Creating props out of hastily sketched illustrations, he takes a drill to the wall to hang up a picture and hoovers the stage (and some of the audience) with gleeful abandon. His attempts to sing his new owner to sleep only keep him awake.
All the while, in this lighthearted production by Dender Cartoontheater from the Netherlands, Thanos Fotiadis builds a quirky soundtrack from guitar loops, vocal ticks and assorted percussion instruments. Even if the show loses some discipline as the robot’s owner makes his escape via submarine and space rocket, it continues to delight the young audience.
Don’t Wait for Me …
French Institute in Scotland until 23 August
You know that thing when you wake up and your house has disappeared? This is the debacle facing the little puppet child at the heart of this delightful show, which has the added novelty of being bilingual.
Aimed at the over fours, Vera Rozanova’s high-precision production takes us on a night-time adventure in which houses take flight like birds leaving their nests. To track down your own house is a challenge: they can be too small, or too easy to get trapped inside of; they may even transform into a galleon on which to sail the high seas.
Switching by the line from French to English, Rozanova is thinking about displacement, finding yourself in strange lands and learning that home is where the heart is. It looks and sounds gorgeous.
Float
Pleasance at EICC until 23 August
Not just what a baby needs, Float is also what every parent needs. Aimed at those under 12 months, Kerry Cleland’s show for Starcatchers is a sublime aquatic-themed experience, staged for three hours at a time, allowing you to come and go.
But why would you want to leave? Taking place around a translucent barrel of water, with the audience snuggling down on beanbags, Float is hypnotic and dreamlike. It shifts imperceptibly from the plip-plop of vocal improvisation to the gentle movement of dancers, catching the light in their silvery costumes and creating a breeze with the sail-like flaps at the top of Alison Brown’s set.
There is a swirling solo in the barrel itself and, when the audience gets sleepy, warm blankets for everyone. Quite the most beguiling show on the fringe.
The Letterman
Gilded Balloon Teviot until 31 August
In this silent introduction to the alphabet, Bryce Flint-Somerville does things with his eyes that other performers could not do without lengthy verbal exposition. With the hangdog look of a naughty schoolboy, he is left unsupervised and makes the most of his freedom. Wordlessly, he makes his intentions clear, instructing the audience to join in with his pranks.
In a gentle comedy for the over fives, he sits on a forbidden chair before sharpening someone else’s pencil and turning it into a balloon-popping weapon. Meanwhile, the towering set of boxes showing every letter of the alphabet except one is taking on a life of its own. He tries hard to keep the letters from falling and even harder to keep them in order while we sing truncated versions of The ABC Song. It is silly and, possibly, even educational.
Quentin Blake’s Mrs Armitage on Wheels
Assembly George Square until 30 August
Fans of Quentin Blake’s Box of Treasures, the BBC’s adaptation of the illustrator’s charming books, will be well at home in a quaintly old-fashioned landscape of Victoria sponges, letterboxes and hedgehogs. Here, the eccentric inventor Mrs Armitage makes repeated attempts to visit her cousin two villages down. Forever distracted, she never quite gets there.
In Samantha Lane’s version with Esk, we also get jolly songs about making the “ordinary extraordinary”, well sung by Lottie Johnson in the title role, supported by puppeteers Christopher Dobson and Duncan Taylor (taking control of Breakspear, the enthusiastic dog). It is bright, mainstream entertainment played inside and outside an inventive wooden shed designed by Ryan Dawson Laight. If it loses some of the ironic wit of the original, it offers wholesome fun all the same.